DENINU KU'E/FORT RESOLUTION
A surprisingly extensive cleanup effort is underway in Fort Resolution after a spill about a month ago from a residential fuel tank.
Patrick Simon, the environmental manager with Deninu Ku'e First Nation, stands next to an excavation site where a fuel oil spill is being cleaned up in Fort Resolution. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo |
The spill is reported to have occurred on April 10 and involved about 1,400 litres of heating oil from a tank outside a public housing duplex.
"It's no threat to public health or safety or anything like that, but there is a fairly significant amount of contamination on the property of that particular dwelling," said Albert Bourque, the regional environmental co-ordinator for the South Slave with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
According to the official spill report, a valve on the tank was unscrewed and tampered with.
Bourque said there were some tool marks which indicate tampering, although he could not say what the motive might have been.
Because of the different densities of water and fuel oil, water accumulates in the bottom of a tank and there is a mechanism for draining
off the water, he explained.
"But if you don't shut the valve off, you'll start draining the diesel fuel off."
Bourque said the tank had recently been filled and had to be refilled a couple of days later, noting most tanks contain about 1,000 litres.
"So it would have been the volume of a full tank and whatever was lost from the previous delivery," he said of the spill. "This is just an estimate of what was lost."
The spilled fuel covered nine square metres on the surface of the ground and excavation is continuing to remove the fuel that seeped into the ground.
"The (NWT) Housing Corporation has hired the services of an environmental engineering firm and they will guide the rest of the cleanup because some of the contamination has migrated underneath the building and one of the difficulties is that this time of the year, the ground is frozen," Bourque said.
The environmental engineering firm will be doing some drilling to determine the extent of the spill and how deep it goes.
No one will be permitted to live in the duplex until the site has been cleaned up and the residents have been provided alternative accommodation, Bourque said.
The contaminated material is being moved to the old bison ranch site for temporary storage before it will be trucked to Hay River to be remediated at a land-farming facility.
Bourque said the decision to use the old bison ranch was made after discussion with the community.
The material will be placed on an impermeable liner on the ground. Once the material is removed to Hay River, the ground at the old bison ranch will be tested and, if any contamination results from storage of the material, that ground will also be removed.
Bourque said it is hard to say how long the contaminated material will be at the bison ranch. Nor was he able to give an estimate of the cost of the cleanup. However, he said the cleanup will be completed this summer.
Patrick Simon, the environmental manager with Deninu Ku'e First Nation, said the main concern in the community is that the spill
site is cleaned up quickly.
"We were just caught unaware of the magnitude and the actual process of it all," he said.
Simon said Fort Resolution already faces a lot of work in the future to clean up contaminated soil from the early 1960s or the "old days" when the federal government used pipes underneath the community to move fuel to holding tanks and buildings from the barges.
"I guess the band is a little bit sensitive about adding to what problems we have around our community," he said.
Simon said the band also has concerns about the bison ranch, noting it hopes to eventually turn that site into a community garden.
